Totara Learn Open Discussions

15 min calendar reminders for Seminars - Sign-up Notifications

Welcome to this forum!

Hi Community,

I’ve been racking my brain looking for an answer and am turning to the collective community for advice.

We are having issues with learners not turning up to our online seminars because they are not receiving a reminder in their calendar (Outlook Calendar).

Our Sign-up notifications does contain the iCal attachment to be added to the learner’s calendar.

Outlook Calendar has the default reminder time set to 15 mins as a group policy.

But there are no 15 min reminders being generated through the Outlook Calendar.

Does anyone else have this problem with Outlook Calendar, or other calendars? Have you found a solution?

Our Totara vendor has advised that it may be due to no VALARM function being contained in the iCal attachment in the signup notification (I’m not entirely sure what that means).

Does anyone know if this something we can edit to add this VALARM function?

Thanks for your time, any other help or guidance is greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Joshua

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Hi Joshua

That is correct the ical that is generated by Totara seminars does not contain the VALARM code which is required to set a reminder message.

If you view the email in a text editor you will see text such as VEVENT to create a calendar entry but no VALARM

I suggest you suggest a new feature on the community for this to help to get support for this

Regards

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Hi Craig,

Thanks for the advice, I see that someone has already created a similar request in the suggest a new feature.

I'll paste the link for any other forum users who are interested in seeing this feature added.

Add alarm event calendars | Voters | Totara

For everyone else,

Until we have the ability to update the iCal file, what are some of the ways you've managed the reminder of online seminar events?

Kind Regards,

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Hi Joshua

There may be setting in your calendar that defaults to alert you when a meeting is due - I use Google calendar and seem to get reminders automatically an hour before the event then have a chance to dismiss or snooze the reminder.

I am not too familiar with other calendars but it looks like Outlook has a default setting for reminders for events in the calendar

regards

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Hi Craig,

Yeah, as a company we have that set to 15 mins, but it only seems to affect events created through Outlook or teams, not those imported from external sources.

From what we've been able to investigate, if there is no valarm function in the ical file, Outlook won't attach a reminder to the event when importing it. Other calendars, like google, will happily attach their default reminder time.

Adding a valarm to the ical file would be a quicker way to force a reminder for all participants through their calendar, rather then relying an automatic notification from Totara via Cron.

regards,

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Hi Joshua

Thanks for the information abut the default setting for Outlook not working - if you can add that to the idea to when creating that would help.

regards

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Hi,

We are experiencing the same issue as Joshua. Any news about the suggestion for a new feature? I have no access to the canny website.

Best regards

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